Soldier’s Joy

In her dream, her husband had written her a love letter. It closed with the following sentence: I’ve looked at myself in the mirror—an admittedly warped and unreliable façade—and been keenly aware of how lucky I am that you still want to live with me.

“Humble bugger, aren’t I?” her husband said when she told him about the dream letter.

“But what about me?” Nana answered. “So self-aggrandizing! So passive-aggressive!”

He rose up on an elbow to blink down at her, his large head and leonine hair eclipsing all else. “I dreamed that some friend of ours, some preposterously impossible person, was pregnant.”

“Someone like Helen?”

He agreed: Helen. “I was very impressed, in the dream. It seemed so goddam optimistic.”

“What was I doing, in your dream?”

“You weren’t there.” He fell back upon his pillow. Mention of Helen, who had been their hostess the previous evening, reminded Nana that she had a phone call to make. It was not an uncommon call; it might not even be necessary with this particular hostess. Yet perhaps that’s what Nana had been trying to tell herself in the dream—that her husband was lucky to have her. Drunk the night before, he’d made a pass at Helen’s nineteen-year-old daughter.

“I hope Rebecca wasn’t alarmed,” Nana said to Helen on the phone.

“Please. She was flattered, just like anybody.” Nana heard the faint sniff of competitiveness, the knotted business between mother and daughter. This vexed tolerance wouldn’t have been the response if one of Helen’s sons had been kissed on the ear or patted on the fanny by a family friend. As a young girl, Rebecca had been overweight and overly furred, with a mustache, thick arm hair, heavy brows; other children had called her Ape Face. The transformation into confident womanhood had been impressive. Her parents weren’t native Texans, but lately they’d been participating in their own version of unveiling the débutante—buying a new wardrobe and bringing her to parties. Nana’s husband had been exceedingly complimentary. “My God, you’re gorgeous!” he’d declared one evening, genuinely astonished. “Look, everyone, isn’t she spectacular?” And there Rebecca had stood, turning red in her tight-fitting green dress.

“No worries,” Helen said. Nana made out the cigarette-lighter flick, the deep, first-of-the-day inhalation. Helen’s bad habit made her less likely to judge others’. She and Nana had met in graduate school and ended up in the same city a dozen years later. Nana wasn’t sure she would have agreed to move to Houston had Helen not been there. Helen was her best friend, although she suspected that she was not Helen’s.

“We should match on purpose. Just to make Libby less bitchy. She’d love to be able to ridicule us. What a generous hostess gift that would be, us in our matching dresses, sizes S and L. She couldn’t keep hating us, if we gave her that.” Nana was the S—in every way less than Helen, not only physically smaller but with fewer attachments, no children, less money, renter rather than owner.

“I’ll wear the poppy dress, and you can decide whether we’ll match or not. Will you apologize to Rebecca?”

“She isn’t so innocent as you think, Nana. I’m sure she was flirting. Just spreading her wings, testing the water. Et cetera.”

Nana closed her eyes, visited the scene, her husband with his arm around Rebecca’s bare shoulders, his mouth at her ear, his diving glance into the décolletage, solicitous, drunk, benevolent, happy. He could not resist beautiful women. “Sometimes he sort of oversteps the avuncular role,” she said.

“Young girls are teases. You and I were, right?”

Nana and Helen were a generation younger than Nana’s husband, their former professor, Dr. Shock; back in graduate school, it hadn’t been clear for a while which of them he favored, brash Helen or tagalong sidekick Nana. Nana hung up the phone, thinking about those flirtatious days, knowing that the circumstances hadn’t been the same. She and Helen had met her husband when they were all at an apex, his as a certified academic celebrity, theirs as nubile acolytes. Back then, he had been a casual tenant of his attractive, still-young body; now he was a fearfully vain and anxious occupant of an older model. For two recent consecutive years, he had gone around claiming to be sixty-nine, not even consciously, so averse was he to the number seventy. Now he was seventy-one. Before climbing into bed at night, he would perform his exercises—chin-ups, sit-ups, pushups. “And sometimes throw-ups,” he would always cheerfully conclude the list. Of Nana he had the expectation, never put into words yet understood nonetheless, that she would keep herself fit and trim and youthful, and that the effort, like the expectation, would be invisible. To that end, she now fixed herself a viscous muddy sludge in the blender, consumed it, and then pulled on her gear, gathered the dogs and their leashes, and took herself for her morning run, all before Dr. Shock, her husband, the emeritus, rolled out of bed.

“Your mother called,” he said without looking up from the Chronicle, when she returned. “Hello, fellows,” he said to the corgis, who dropped themselves panting at his feet, back legs splayed like chicken drumsticks. He’d sat there and not answered the phone. On the machine was her mother’s tentative inquiry into Nana’s life. Her parents had not known what to make of her marriage to a man their age; they still, many years later, were perplexed, treating Nana as if she’d suddenly transformed from the girl they’d known into an adult they couldn’t fathom. Which was, essentially, the truth. She was an only child, the first on either side of her family to go to college. They could not debate what she’d learned there, or what she’d acquired: a husband who not only was old enough to be her father but was divorced, with two estranged sons who were her age. Never mind her degrees, undergraduate and graduate, a redundant pedigree that appeared to have led her no further than to housewifery, in the end. When her parents visited, they tried not to bother anybody, inhabiting the guest room like ghosts, treading lightly. They brought her news of her old neighborhood in Wichita, and of their ailing siblings, and a box of waxy chocolates from the local candymaker. They sat working not to wince as they sipped the wine that Nana’s husband insisted on serving them, an expensive bottle, always perfect with whatever meal they would politely eat but not enjoy, a recipe that Nana had chosen from a gourmet magazine and that was, she would realize as soon as she was in their presence, far removed from their modest tastes. They wanted sweet tea and cream gravy. They wanted grandchildren.

Her husband, the professor, had assumed that he’d be able to expand his in-laws’ horizons. He had been confident that he would seduce them, as he was famous for doing with students and colleagues, by means of generosity, immodesty, flamboyant declarations, sodden affection. But although Nana’s parents were nothing but gracious to him, they were never going to fall under his spell.

“Daddy’s had an accident,” Nana’s mother told her when she called her back. Her father had lost control of his car, driven onto a sidewalk and into an outdoor café. Nana hadn’t even known that Wichita had outdoor cafés, and, fortunately, the place wasn’t popular enough for there to have been anyone sitting at the tables he’d crashed through. Her father had been injured, though, and then cited, requiring, first, surgery and, next, perhaps, a lawyer.

He came onto the phone now, clearing his throat, speaking weakly from his hospital bed. “Nana, honey, could you come help Mom?” And within the hour Nana was behind the wheel of her car, headed from Houston to Kansas, Dr. Shock left behind to hold down the fort: care for the dogs and make an appearance at Libby’s dinner party.

When she spoke with her husband, the next day, he dismissed her question about the party. “Dull,” he declared. This meant one of several things. Least likely was that the evening was actually dull; more plausible was that he’d got too drunk to recall events in a narrative worth retelling; most probable was that he’d done something he could remember very well and did not wish to discuss. Nana sighed, wondering if she should phone Libby to give a generic apology, then decided to consult with Helen first, and discover what it was that her husband wasn’t saying.

“Was Helen wearing her poppy dress?” Nana asked.

He paused before responding. “I don’t recall.” This was a lie, Nana could tell. But why lie about something so trivial as that?

“Was Rebecca there?”

“Yes,” he said. “Her dress was black, in case you’re wondering. A little black dress.” The dogs began to bark then. Nana guessed that her husband had incited their racket, just to give him a good reason to hang up. It was easy to work them into such a state. You had merely to lead them to the plate-glass porch door and point out a squirrel or a cat running on the railing, or the automatic pool vacuum flipping its tail in the water as it carried on, side to side, end to end. They were brothers, two and a half years old. Lacking children, Nana and her husband had settled for dogs; their friends no doubt joked about their misplaced affection. This was the third pair of siblings they’d owned, first black Labs, next cocker spaniels, now the corgis—each set a slightly smaller breed. “We’ll die with Chihuahuas,” Nana had once told her husband. “You’ll die with Chihuahuas,” he had corrected her. “I’ll die during the dachshunds.” In the past, he had enjoyed pointing out the discrepancy in their ages. He didn’t do that anymore. “The lads are protesting,” he now said faintly into the phone. “I’ll call you later.”

Nana’s mother asked about the dogs before she did her son-in-law. And how she struggled to call a man her own age her “son-in-law.” The title begged to be inflected with irony, and Nana’s mother wasn’t capable of irony.

“All well?” she said cheerfully, disallowing any answer other than an affirmative. She was rooting in her purse for lipstick, preparing herself for the morning’s trip to the hospital. Nana had arrived too late to visit her father the night before.

“Whose shoes are those?” Nana asked as they headed out, noticing for the first time an array of children’s footwear—snow boots, flip-flops, plastic high heels—by her parents’ back door.

“Didn’t I tell you who moved into the Dixons’ old place?”

“Remind me,” Nana said.

Peter Hinshaw. Nana’s first boyfriend. Who now had a wife, and two children. He’d come to the open house only because he’d mistaken the address, thought it was Nana’s home on the market. On a bored Sunday whim, he’d brought his wife and son and daughter, expecting to revisit the rooms where he’d first had sex, first got drunk, first dropped acid, but, instead, had found himself in the house next door, and his wife, untutored in any kind of context, had fallen in love.

Pete’s wife had fallen for her new neighbors, Nana’s parents, as well. Her children had become their surrogate grandkids, running through the drive and yard that connected the properties, charging up the back steps, kicking off their shoes, and entering Nana’s kitchen as if it were their own. They called Nana’s parents by their first names, Bud and Lil. They had favorite places around the house, stations that they visited: the piano with its glass dish of meltaway mints; the base of the dining-room table, where a town of blocks and thimbles was set up; a giant jar of change in the sewing room, too heavy to lift but lovely to study; and the aquarium full of fish, into whose gawping mouths they took turns dropping the minutest bits of food. Nana’s mother’s joy in these children, her father’s reputed amused lenience, stung Nana. Nothing she could do would transport her parents in quite the same way. Indulging these two small people, ages three and five, was as much as they could ever wish for.

Nana and her mother came home from the hospital to find the children waiting on the back steps. With their pink skin and blond mops, they did not resemble their father. Peter’s skin had always been sallow, his hair a dark kinky mess, his eyes sunk in gloomy sockets. These drug-addict, rock-star features had attracted Nana in high school. She was not immune to their appeal now. Pete had broken up with her to date a college girl, trading up. Nana hadn’t held this against him, although for a long while she had suffered—suffered as if kicked in the ribs by a horse, in tremendous pain but with no real hostility toward the animal itself. It was perhaps that college girl, all those years ago, whose allure had convinced Nana that she absolutely had to attend college herself. And a better one than the local U. She would be a coed from a school with a national reputation. She would show Peter Hinshaw. In fact, her eventual marriage to her professor could very well have been the fruition of that seed sown by Peter.

“Hey, Pete,” she greeted him, when he slouched into her parents’ house to retrieve his children. She wished that he had lost hair and gained weight; instead, he looked as she remembered him, which is to say that she felt herself attuned to him, to everything about him, once again. She knew what those lips felt like, that coiled hair; she remembered the odor of breath mint, smoke, beer when he kissed her on the cheek. Still indulging and hiding his vices. The badly shaved rough neck.

“Ba-Nana,” he said drolly, not bothering to disguise his lazy leering scan, dragged from foot to head like the amplified snarl of a guitar riff. From the hallway came the commotion of his children, the little boy and girl running headlong into the room then, suddenly silenced—brought up short—by his presence. It was as if he beat them. Except that he wouldn’t beat them. He would embarrass them. He would make them self-conscious. He would not laugh at what wasn’t amusing, or praise indiscriminately, out of politeness. He was finicky, and frank, and relentless. “Intense,” everyone had agreed uneasily, in high school; it had been a coup to be his girlfriend, to pass his peculiar muster.

“What are you no-necks up to?” he asked the girl, turning in her direction without releasing Nana from his glance.

“Playing,” she said shyly, edging behind Nana’s mother’s knees.

“Playing,” her brother echoed, a plea. In his hand he held an unravelling cardboard tube from gift wrap; they’d been charging around the house, sword fighting.

“Peter,” Nana’s mother said, ecstatic as hostess, mother, ersatz grandmother, queen of the castle, bestower of cardboard swords. “Sit down. Say hello to Nana. She’s come to help.” Her mother had no idea what had happened in her house, all those years ago. The blow-outs in the basement, the escapades in Nana’s bedroom, the hidden niches where the bottles and pills and baggies had been stashed—her own little stations, Nana thought. Her parents had been notoriously oblivious.

The woman’s innocence, compounded by the children’s, returned them to high school, Peter and Nana staring at each other through the whir of sweetness that ensued: bright-pink juice being drunk and spilled, cookies offered and crumbled, sugar suffusing the atmosphere, while across the table, across years and other partners, a snaking heat coalesced between them, something engineered out of naughtiness and nostalgia, the knowledge of a shared history, wavering there like a faint layer of pollution.

Which would be thoroughly whisked away by the arrival of the wife. She wasn’t the cool coed from back when. He’d married a physical therapist, an upbeat, wide-faced young woman, a leader of cheers. She, like her children, entered Nana’s old home as if its inhabitants were her close relations; it was a confidence that had to do with good intentions, purity. “Honey, I’m so sorry about Bud” were her first words to Nana’s mother. “I took him a can of cashews and a puzzle book. Pete, you know you have messages on the machine?”

Pete’s wife held out her hand to shake Nana’s. “I would recognize you anywhere! All those pictures in the albums.” Her smile made her eyes wrinkle atop her apple-round cheeks. She was so unlikely, Nana thought, though perhaps Pete needed such a girl to keep him in line—to provide cover for him by making small talk, uttering pleasantries. A person person, as opposed to a misanthrope. To her every address she appended a term of endearment: sweetness, monkey, pie-pie. Her children scooted onto chairs beside her as she sat at the table, each leaning close to her radiant good will.

But what did he offer her? Martyrdom?

“Come see my tree house?” Pete said to Nana.

“It was our tree house,” the little girl said, “but Daddy took it.”

“Our tree house,” the boy repeated sadly.

Pete stood, patting the shirt pocket over his heart, where a hard-pack of Camels showed itself. “I’ll check the messages,” he told his wife. “Bye, Lil. Coming?” he asked Nana.

Nana’s husband wanted to hear all about her ex-boyfriend.

“Why didn’t you answer, before?” Nana asked. She imagined him ignoring the ringing phone, humming boredly right beside the machine as she left her messages. It was nearly midnight, and she was up on the porch roof, beneath the tree limbs, looking down at the Dixons’ old house. Pete’s house. Faint pink night-lights lit the upstairs hall; in the basement, another light was on, this of the bare-bulb variety. Nana guessed that Pete was under that bulb, either there or in his tree house, designed for the children, co-opted by him. He’d led her up its circular metal stairway treads, into its boys’-club confines. First he’d got her stoned, then he’d leaned over to put his lips on hers.

The night had turned brisk, as it always did just before Halloween; a wind had whipped up, and what few leaves were left in the trees slapped against the porch roof, switched at Nana’s legs. Her mother would have been horrified to find her there, imperilled on the roof, as she had been in the old days. Would Nana never cease scaring that poor woman?

Meanwhile, Nana’s husband was drinking. “The old soldier’s joy,” he informed her jauntily. He would be snug in his reading chair in their Houston study, paging through weighty art books. He couldn’t concentrate on words in this state but enjoyed falling into the large color plates of these expensive volumes. His Rauschenbergs, his de Koonings, his Twomblys, and, saddest of all, his Rothkos. In this abstract mood (“This is when I relish visions of suicide,” he’d told her once), he tonight discerned something about her commentary, peeled back her father’s (stable) condition, her mother’s (chatty) busyness, to inquire into the neighbor, the former boyfriend, the surprise, the narrative aside. Underpainting, Nana thought, the hidden figures beneath the public subject. He could perceive it anywhere.

“Tell me about the reunion with the boyfriend,” her husband said. “Spare no detail. A hug?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Peck on the cheek? Kiss? Lingering glance?”

Nana heard his longing to have her say that they had fooled around. He wanted to be titillated by the situation, turned on by the scenario, have a little phone-sex intermission before returning to his art books. He liked it when men flirted with Nana, when they stood too close or stared overlong, tucked in her dress tag or brushed against her. And, in the past, Nana had exaggerated these incidents, especially while making love with her husband, so that he could feel like the winner, so that she could feel like the prize. He made use of it as foreplay; also, he seemed to think that it excused his own lecherous tendencies. But now that his inquiry might lead to something true, Nana found it difficult to remember how she usually played the game. “You sound like you want me to sleep with him,” she said eventually.

“Do I?”

“You do.”

“Maybe I do. If you did, would you tell me about it?”

“I don’t want to sleep with him,” she lied. “We already did that, a long time ago.”

“Therefore, if you slept with him again, your over-all stats wouldn’t change.” Her “stats” were known to her husband. A mere handful. Nana had been timid. His number of partners was much higher, higher even than might be expected, given his twenty-plus-year head start. He couldn’t remember all their names, those many women with whom he’d had sex.

“The stats would change.” She had never been unfaithful, had never wanted to be unfaithful.

“Nana,” he said, laughing. He was so confident, she thought, so sure that she still felt herself the lucky object of the esteemed professor’s attention. In her mind, she opened the drawer of his night table, just to be appalled by the number of pill bottles there, the dirty secret of his decline. At that moment, the side door at the Dixons’ clattered open; it was Pete emerging. He didn’t let the storm door rattle shut behind him, but held it on its wheezing hydraulic arm, then simply sat on his side steps and lit a cigarette. Nana watched him from her perch.

“Sh-h-h,” she whispered to her husband, without thinking.

They made love in her bedroom, on the bed where they’d first made love, when they were sixteen years old. Their bodies loved each other, she thought; they remembered—they knew what to do when put together. Outside, the sky was tin-can gray, a depressing light that softened Nana’s embarrassment. Yet, naked, there was no longer awkwardness between them; his suit of flesh, unlike her husband’s, did not hang loose upon a discernible skeleton. His mouth tasted of marijuana, his body temperature seemed to be precisely the same as hers, his arrangement of limbs designed to perfectly match hers, so that embracing him was like entering a dream, like falling under a spell. They moved with the familiarity of instinct, and when they rolled over, still attached, it reminded Nana of her dogs at play, harmonious intimacy. Was she really comparing them to animals? Forsaking words, or articulate thought at all? Was that a way to disclaim the significance of what passed between them? In fact, mightn’t she find it all the more profound for that reason?

She wanted to say that she loved him—because she loved what had just happened, because she loved the strange intoxicant they had recovered and shared—but only a fool made that claim first.

“Last time we used a rubber,” he eventually said, a half-smile on his contemptuous lips. Nana hadn’t even thought about protection, proof of her innocence.

“Last time it moved along a little faster.” She was trying to match his nonchalance, but nothing could have been further from the truth of how she felt.

They heard her mother arrive home downstairs. Nana had claimed a headache that morning, watching from her window as, first, her neighbors took themselves away, the mom in the car with the boy and the girl in the back, waving to Pete in his sweatpants on the porch. He’d raised his eyes from their car as it pulled down the drive, seeing Nana through the glass. Not long after her mother had also driven away, he had rapped on the back door. She’d opened it and then had not moved out of the way, forcing him, if he planned to come in, to step up and into her arms. They hardly spoke as they wandered the familiar path from kitchen to dining room, then upstairs and down the hall to Nana’s girlhood room. “Haven’t been up here lately,” he murmured as she shut the door and latched the hook and eye that she’d screwed into the woodwork years ago.

Later, they’d listened as her mother made her slow way along the same route, then knocked on the bedroom door. Nana finally registered something of what she’d expected: guilt, shame, delinquency. Till that moment, she’d been operating in a sort of fog, acting on the hazy excited intuition of what felt good and of the merciful absence of her mind. She called out that she’d be right down.

“Daddy’s coming home this afternoon,” her mother said through the door. “Maybe you could pick him up while I fix supper?”

Pete was sitting on the edge of the bed by then, still naked, like an athlete on the bench, after a game, revving, yet worn out. He turned and gave her a devilish grin. “Sure,” Nana called.

“Daddy,” he mouthed. “Supper.”

She laid her head on Pete’s back, on the soft top knobs of his spinal column, where his hair reached her cheek. Again, she wished to say that she loved him—not because she was sure she loved him but because it was such a perfectly insular sentence. No one knew that they were here, together. She wished never to leave this instant, its singularity and repleteness.

“Keep her in the kitchen,” he said into Nana’s ear. “I’ll go out the front.”

Her father reclined across the back seat, pain medication making his sentences syrupy, his bare toes at the end of a heavy full-leg cast resting on the door handle. Without meaning to, he’d lowered the back window. The air was wet and cool, and Nana cracked her own window. The chill felt good; it cleared the odor of antiseptic and plaster from the vehicle. Her husband was only four years younger than this man. Of course she had always known that. It was because her father was sedated and prostrate, because he hadn’t bothered to put on his eyeglasses, that his age and vulnerability, and by extension her husband’s age and vulnerability, now suddenly upset her.

And also because of Pete, because making love with him had left her younger.

“Mom’s fixing meat loaf,” she announced, over-loud.

“Mom,” he said, the only word he’d ever need; it would be his last, she thought.

For the rest of the ride, Nana let herself fall into a full flashback of sex with Pete. In the windy car, it warmed her like a glowing pilot light, steady, ready to flare into action.

On the phone to her husband, she lied, claiming that her father wasn’t home yet. She was sitting on the roof again, as a cold dusk settled, the sky tinged green. “They’re worried about infection,” she said. “He still has a fever. And diarrhea,” she added, for the verity that only a non sequitur could provide.

“And how’s the boyfriend? That good neighbor?”

“Pete?” She looked down automatically, to the places he might occupy, and felt a faint ignition in her chest.

“Peter, the boy next door, that one. How’s the reunion shaping up? Nothing like a rekindled romance, in my experience.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I fucked Deborah, a few years after the divorce, and it was terrific. Much better than when we were married, light-years better, like strangers, like Anaïs Nin characters. Ahh,” he sighed happily, for a moment off in memory somewhere, then back. “Of course, that was long before I met you. Now, tell me about Peter.”

Pete, Nana corrected, as if cradling his warm head in her palm. “I don’t like that word,” she said.

“You use it all the time.”

“Not as a verb.” She hadn’t fucked anybody, ever. “He’s fine,” she said, of Pete, wondering what her husband really hoped to learn. It bothered Nana to hear his self-assured voice, his confession about his ex, which seemed to demand a reciprocal response, tit for tat. It was like a parent trying to coax a lying child into admitting an obvious truth. Or maybe it felt like that because that was what it so closely, factually, resembled. “He’s pathetic,” she plunged ahead. “Unemployed, hanging around like a sullen teen-ager. Even down to the tree house. He’ll be lucky if his wife doesn’t leave him.”

Her husband laughed. “Just like me! Isn’t that what I wrote in that letter in your dream?” Then he told her that he had been invited to the Merrills’ for dinner, was leaving in a little while. Their friends would take care of him, in Nana’s absence, would rally round to feed and entertain him.

“Stay away from the stemware,” she warned. He’d broken many glasses, over time, at the Merrills’. They insisted on serving wine in extremely fine crystal; sometimes he demanded to use a jelly jar, prophylactically. It was a standing joke. Their friends found him charming; he was famous for his passionate arguments, his stormy exits, followed by exorbitant apologies, heartfelt embraces, exquisite handwritten notes. Beloved, he was, flaws and all.

He said one more thing before hanging up: “I don’t care if you sleep with him, but you have to tell me. Agreed?”

“I’m not going to sleep with him,” Nana said. She closed the cell phone and held it to her throat, shut her eyes, and felt Pete all around her.

Now she debated phoning Helen. One wanted to tell, she realized. After the initial crucial privacy, one wished to speak aloud what had transpired. As an excuse, as an opening gambit, she could ask Helen to keep an eye on her husband’s drinking at the Merrills’; also, she could thank Helen for the flowers, which had arrived that afternoon, lurid non-native blossoms that vaguely alarmed Lil. Nana could ask what Helen would be wearing tonight, what had happened at Libby’s, two evenings before.

Rebecca answered at Helen’s house.

“She’s over at your place,” the girl said.

“No, I’m in Kansas. My father was in an accident.” Nana started to fill in with the information about his hospitalization, when Rebecca cut her off with an exasperated sigh.

“Come on, Nana. Do you really not know what’s going on with them? Are you really so totally out of touch?”

“I’m sorry?” Nana’s first thought was that Rebecca was drunk or high, that she had regressed to the terrifying adolescence that her parents believed had, thank God, passed.

“It’s been, like, years,” Rebecca went on. “If I know, if my brothers know, it just seems impossible that you don’t know. Doesn’t it?” The girl paused. Nana had pushed herself back to the window that led onto the roof, was beginning to climb inside. Fear had gripped her; she felt as if she might suddenly, after all these years, truly be at risk of falling from her perch. “O.K., whatever,” Rebecca said. “I’ll tell her you called.”

Nana was out the front door before she realized she’d gone down the stairs. They’d flown beneath her feet, lightly, as if she had floated from second to first floor, noting on her way the purple-and-black flowers from Helen, obscene red stamens lingering on her retina as she left her parents’ porch. She went straight to the Dixons’ house, stepping up Pete’s walkway and to his front, rather than side, door. Her mother did not have a view of the front door from her kitchen window. Her father could not see it from where he was propped before the television in the den. Pete did not immediately ask her in, but stood on the other side of a torn black screen. She must have had a look about her, because his expression grew more guarded. Had she come here to test for that guardedness?

From the kitchen, at the back of the house, came the sound of singing, of children laughing. That was what he was guarding.

“I came to say goodbye,” Nana chose to say.

Now he unhooked the door, pushed it open. He hadn’t shaved; she longed to bury her face in his rough warm throat. She wished to banish both her husband and Helen, forget Rebecca’s no-nonsense voice, and disappear in Pete’s embrace. But he turned his back, picked up a beer from the end table next to a chair. Why was he in here, in the dark, instead of in the lighted kitchen? What had he been doing when she rang the bell? Back when he’d found the college girl, when he’d shrugged his helpless farewell to Nana, she’d taken her cue from him, too: she would not show her need.

When her husband was being courted by the department in Houston, he had been taken out to dinner with the other endowed chairs in the liberal arts. Helen was married to one. Nana’s husband had phoned her later, in California, to tell her the news: her old friend, now Mrs. Helen Nolan, was ready to reënter her life, lucky happenstance, a sign. Helen might have been standing beside him in the hotel room even then, pulling earrings out of her ears, or replacing them, lighting a cigarette, pre- or post-coital.

Nana could not say which of these people, her husband or her best friend, was the most responsible for the pain she felt now, that kicked-in-the-ribs sensation.

“Do you think I should stay here?” she asked, and, when he scowled, as if she meant his living room, added, “In Wichita, I mean? Should I stay with them for a while?”

“I don’t know. They’d be happy.” He fell back into his chair, looked at the ceiling. He could be cold, she remembered; it was all coming back to her. When she began crying, he jumped up and hustled her out the front door. “This way,” he said, not waiting for her to agree, but leading her around the drive, to the back, to his tree house, where he lit the gas heater. “Don’t tell the codes people,” he said, “but this is an illegal appliance.” The small space filled with the odor of both the gas and the struck match. They sat on the floor beside each other, knees touching. Nana put her hand on his, and he removed it. “No,” he said. “That would be a mistake.”

Why? she wanted to wail. Why aren’t I enough? For anyone, it seemed?

Instead, he reached for the hookah.

“Mr. Dixon died in your basement,” Nana told him.

“Yeah,” Pete said as he slowly exhaled. “It’s got that aura.” From the tree house they could see both kitchens below, his and hers, figures moving in the lighted windows. Nana took her turn with the hookah, inhaled, felt the blue glow enter her. She and Pete had first kissed at a party in the country, sitting around a fire, smoking pot. They hadn’t said much, just leaned away from the group and into each other. Now Pete held a lighter to the bowl, circling it expertly with the flame.

“You’d rather get high than kiss,” she said. “Or make love.”

He looked up, his eyes reflecting the lighter’s yellow flame. “Or anything,” he said. The hashish had calmed him, made him the beautiful boy he’d been. She nodded, hoping that she looked to him like the girl she’d been.

She came home red-eyed, her shoes filthy with mud from the yard between their houses. She slipped them off at the back door, left them with the children’s shoes there.

Her father had somehow ambulated in from the den, and was arranged sideways at the kitchen table, his bright-white cast propped on a second chair. Her mother fussed between stove and table, narrating happily, like a twittering bird. As usual, her parents were oblivious of the redness of Nana’s eyes, of the odor she had surely brought with her. On the table, meat loaf. Milk. Soft bread and margarine. Nana fell into her chair as if she’d been pushed.

It was so exhausting to consider, the whole past that she would now have to revisit and amend, unstitch and patch back together, her husband and her friend Helen, from graduate-school days to the current moment. Right now those two would be sitting under the twinkling lights and the elaborate bug zappers in the Merrills’ courtyard sculpture garden, passing appetizers, discussing art and politics, staring at each other over the rims of fine stemware.

“Just in time!” her mother said, hovering above the food, filling three plates, then settling in her customary seat.

“Thanks, Mom,” Nana’s father said.

“We’re so glad to have you here,” Nana’s mother said to her. “I was telling Dad, even in these crazy circumstances, it’s awfully nice.”

Concentrating hard through the foggy effects of Pete’s hashish, Nana picked up her fork and faced this simple meal. It was very difficult, as if she were starting all the way back at the beginning. ♦